• Next Week's Plan: Will visit SPLASH to present a paper "A case for feminism in programming language design" co-authored with Ari Schlesinger. A preprint is available at the end of the post or in the ACM digital library.
• Rejecting Feminism in the Past: Gave a talk to young female CS students last year and found that they mostly identified as feminists. At that time, the author didn't identify as a feminist and bought into the 'lean in feminism' idea. There were only a few women in the CS program, so the author didn't want to attract more attention by complaining.
• Feminism is about Examining Systems: A core tenet of feminism is to ask why things are the way they are and examine how to make them more fair. The author developed questions about why the PL community is the way it is and found that feminism has a lot to say about systems of power.
• What is a Programming Language: The definition of programming languages is social and groups decide what is in and out. The author has been bothered by the question of what is and isn't a programming language for a long time. For example, spreadsheets are often not considered programming languages despite being Turing complete.
• How to Study Programming Languages: The author has wondered why studies with human subjects are so rare in PL. After exploring feminism, the author realizes that understanding the systems of power behind beliefs is important. The author hopes this will help people understand the paper better.